Friday, August 29, 2008

What a refreshing change it will be to be screwed over by a largely black guy

Dennis Perrin reads my mind and writes what I'd write if I thought exactly what I think, and was Dennis Perrin. A tasty bit:

Obama the community activist is long dead. The guy is one step
away from managing an aggressive empire. Not quite what King had in
mind, I'm guessing.

"I have a dream, that one day, a man of
African heritage will rise up from humble beginnings, and take the
reins of imperial power, bombing and starving poor people he's never
met in order appease those affluent few who made his ascent possible. I
have a dream today!" [...]

All I
saw last night was collective mania and delusion. The fact that a black
man may lead the next phase of empire is genius, a beautiful cover. How
long the con will last is anyone's guess.

Anyone? Wait, that's me! And my guess is zero, four, or eight years, depending on how many presidential elections Obama manages to win. Those who can see through his facade are doing so already, while vanishingly few of those who don't (or don't want to) ever will—just as precious few of the people whose critical faculties were overthrown by Bill Clinton's priapic charisma ever managed to break their mental chains. There's nothing like the power of self-delusion, especially when it's carefully nurtured by a shyster of Obama's caliber.

Though there's a tiny part of me that's glad to see this particular symbolic barrier breached in a country with such a deeply racist past, that's thin gruel indeed compared to what Obama truly represents: yet another carbon copy Democrat, dedicated to neoliberal principles, exquisitely attuned to the needs of corporations, properly obeisant to Israel, and ready and willing to expend billions more on the military machine with which he fully intends to bloody his hands. And as long as all of that holds true—as it has for all major party candidates during my lifetime, and likely will until I finish my mortal coil shufflin'—I couldn't care less about their melanin count or naughty bits.